Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
misapprehensions, sometimes perilous ones, as the following episode illustrates.
A few days after some men of the Baudin expedition had made their presence known to a local group of Bruny Islanders (Tasmanians), a M. Maurouard engaged in what he thought was a sporting round of arm wrestling with an indigenous man, forcing him to give ground in a way that apparently seemed to everyone to clearly spell victory for the Frenchman. The French thought the indigenous men had accepted what they saw as “defeat” at this “sport.” But a few minutes later a spear came flying back at them, thrown by one of the natives who had seemingly left a few minutes earlier, and pierced Maurouard’s shoulder. Baudin wrote of earlier minutes of this episode: “It seems that the best possible relations existed constantly between the two parties. A quarter of an hour before the departure, the natives had indeed all disappeared, but as they had been loaded with presents and were in excellent spirits, the men were far from distrusting them” (1974:304).
It seems the Aborigines’ disappearance a quarter of an hour earlier may have meant more than the visitors thought. It may have provided an occasion for some who were negatively inclined toward the French to talk among themselves. This constant concern with emotional states in these early, face-to-face encounters is gradually transformed, with extension of colonization and the proliferation of settlers and their institutions, into ever more stereotypic characterizations of indigenous people (see Chapter 4).
Music and Materiality
There was a repertoire of early encounter methods that voyagers brought with them to try to channel early contacts. Some of these involved music, dance, and greeting behavior, and a considerable range of material offerings that, it was hoped, would engage indigenous people and create good feeling. In a letter of 1788 Arthur Phillip wrote, linking music and imitation: “They … are fond of any very soft Musick, and will attend to singing any of the Words which they very readily repeat” (Clendinnen 2005:26). Captain-Lieutenant Watkin Tench (an officer of the First Fleet) reported in his journal that one of his party “whistled the air of Malbrooke” at which the natives appeared “highly charmed” (see Tench 2009:43; also Clendinnen 2005:9–10). The singing was not all one way. William Dawes (1825) reports a lively young Aboriginal girl rising to sing for an English company—though the effort to charm with song is more often reported of themselves by diarists than of natives.
Clearly music was not only thought to be engaging and soothing; it also stood out as a mode of contact far different from trying to make propositional content understood. It was meant to launch something between arrivals and natives that the latter could attend to directly, and the fact that natives sometimes took up the tune and sang back was an additional, but perhaps unexpected, benefit.
Two recent historical works have focused on other elements of the colonial repertoire: dancing (Clendinnen 2005) and shaking hands (Shellam 2009). At Sydney Cove, 29 January 1788, three days after landfall, Lieutenant William Bradley “had his first meeting with the Australians. It was a remarkably friendly encounter, the British party being welcomed ashore by unarmed men who pointed out a good landing place ‘in the most cheerful manner, shouting and dancing’ ” (Clendinnen 2005:8). Then, Bradley says, “ ‘these people mixed with ours and all hands danced together.’ The next day at Spring Cove there was another impromptu dance party when about a dozen of the local men came paddling in soon after the British landed, left their spears in their canoes as a sign of friendship, and all proceeded to more ‘dancing and otherwise amusing themselves’ ” (ibid., 8).
With reference to this dancing reproduced on the cover of her book Dancing with Strangers, Inga Clendinnen (2005:9) comments: “What [Bradley] shows us is the British and the Australians dancing hand in hand like children at a picnic: that is, dancing in the British style…. Furthermore, the pairs are scattered over the whole foreground, with none of the local preference for formation dancing, which reinforces my suspicion that it was the British who took the initiative.” I share Clendinnen’s suspicion: that the English took the initiative in this combined English-Aboriginal dancing, as they did in producing music. (There is evidence of Aborigines dancing by themselves and at a distance, perhaps not in welcome but self-protectively or to induce outsiders to approach; see, e.g., Bradley 1969:66; Baudin 1974:322.)
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